Quite possibly, if one shows one's work on how one arrived at that statement (statistics can be bloody slippery things, and while individual data points are facts, the analysis, interpretation, and summarization of them starts to wander away from "fact," especially when one begins to do curve fitting or assumptions about population distributions).
And if one runs with that fact alone and tries to build behaviors on it, one's likely to fall into a similar trap to the one the phrenologists fell into: assuming that a single fact is descriptive enough of the world to dictate theory or practice.
>Quite possibly, if one shows one's work on how one arrived at that statement (statistics can be bloody slippery things, and while individual data points are facts, the analysis, interpretation, and summarization of them starts to wander away from "fact," especially when one begins to do curve fitting or assumptions about population distributions).
Any and every statistical study ever done on race and crime supports the FACT stated above. Per capita, it's an indisputable fact that they commit more violent crimes, raw numbers alone, no curve fitting or extrapolation.
>And if one runs with that fact alone and tries to build behaviors on it, one's likely to fall into a similar trap to the one the phrenologists fell into: assuming that a single fact is descriptive enough of the world to dictate theory or practice.
Which brings us back to my original statement. Are facts racist and sexist?
"Water at standard atmospheric pressure boils at 100 degrees C and freezes at 0 degrees C" is not open to interpretation.
Making a terse sociological claim from statistics is almost always open to interpretation. Statistics is the science of interpreting discrete data points, looking for patterns and relations. Lies, damn lies, and all that. The only thing that stands alone without interpretation in statistics is the input data itself, and that tells us nothing.
I suspect that for the specific claim you've made, the evidence supports the claim, but I'd want to see whether they've controlled for conflating the definition of "crimes committed" with "charged with crimes" or "convicted of crimes" to be certain. Or whether the statistics are using the Bayesian or frequentist approach (after all, the claim being made is "are more likely," and that always assumes a giant pile of unstated priors). Or or or, etc.
Even still, whether the statistical claim being made is fact is uninteresting. If one assumes it's fact, the interesting question is "What do you do with it?" In isolation, with that one fact? Nothing. It's not nearly enough info to form theory or policy. Which is why my original response to your original post was about interpretation, not fact. Interpretation is where things get interesting. Facts without interpretation are dead as rocks.
>Making a terse sociological claim from statistics is almost always open to interpretation.
Almost, but in specific cases like above, it is not open to interpretation. It's a raw fact.
>Statistics is the science of interpreting discrete data points, looking for patterns and relations.
And organizing and presenting discrete data, without interpolation.
>The only thing that stands alone without interpretation in statistics is the input data itself, and that tells us nothing.
Wrong. Basic presentation without interpolation is a core pillar of statistics.
>I suspect that for the specific claim you've made, the evidence supports the claim, but I'd want to see whether they've controlled for conflating the definition of "crimes committed" with "charged with crimes" or "convicted of crimes" to be certain.
Even with controlling, African Americans are charged, commit, and are convicted of more crimes than Asian Americans.
>Or whether the statistics are using the Bayesian or frequentist approach (after all, the claim being made is "are more likely," and that always assumes a giant pile of unstated priors).
None of the above, just basic summary statistics.
>Even still, whether the statistical claim being made is fact is uninteresting. If one assumes it's fact, the interesting question is "What do you do with it?"
It's super interesting, considering what the OP asked.
>Nothing. It's not nearly enough info to form theory or policy.
It's more than enough info to form theory, and possibly policy.
>Which is why my original response to your original post was about interpretation, not fact.
And what I've stated above is fact, not interpretation. Back to square one.
>Interpretation is where things get interesting. Facts without interpretation are dead as rocks.
Wrong. Facts without interpretation are as alive as can be, and stand on their own.
Yeah, that's exactly why that's not enough data to put together policy. You might as well measure bumps on people's heads to predict whether they want anti-violence funding; you'll have about as much luck as you will chasing it after skin color or "manifestations in African American culture that breeds violence" (what does that even mean?).
> Bumps on people's heads have nothing to do with violence. This is a non sequitur.
I submit to you it's exactly as irrelevant as skin color. I submit to you if you take the population that you have described, change only the category from "African American" to another category and nothing else, and kept the same population of people with no other parameters changed, you would not see a change in the violence rate.
Believing that measurable correlation implies causation is one of the major failings that I see often encouraged in the computer science space. It underpins some of the greatest failings of machine learning.
You made claims about population and then claims about interventions that suggest that the population membership is causal. What if the causal issue is poverty? Poverty in the United States is so deeply correlated with being a member of a racial category that it is extremely hard to disambiguate effects that show up in race from effects that show up in income and asset levels. This is what I mean when I say lies, damn lies, and statistics.
Because if the cause is poverty and not "African American culture," then violence interventions for African Americans are like "get your energy level up" interventions for people who are starving. You'll waste good money treating the wrong problem. You'll also miss people that also have the same problem but don't get any intervention because they don't fit the poorly-defined template.
"Told the truth." LOL. Yep, the kind of truth that got him fired with cause so hard the NLRB wouldn't go to bat for him.
Apparently, being a Harvard grad, MIT research scientist doesn't guarantee an understanding of how not to get fired. Oh well. Google can always replace him with another Harvard grad, MIT research scientist with a better ability to play well with others. That's the perk of being Google; you don't have to tolerate the semi-productive smart kid who alienates his co-workers with "facts" he thinks he understands but doesn't. :-p
That's been my general thought. Legally a company can fire you for any reason except the ones they aren't allowed too. Trying to undermine a companies diversity policies on a company owned channel when said company already has public problem with diversity, good way to get 86'd.
Sounds like you had junior admins at best leading your university's *NIX department.
A mid-level admin in 1995 could have easily made a 100 line script to kill background processes from non-logged in users that were running over three hours (or whatever).
I don't understand this angle. You acknowledge the functionality could have been useful even 25 years ago; it makes perfect sense for a daemon developer to integrate the functionality into a session manager and put it behind a config flag which is exactly what they did.
But that’s such a useless definition because then all software “provides nothing” since it’s implementation proves that you could have written it yourself.
logind is far more robust than any of the janky shell scripts
I’ve seen over the years to accomplish this.
The functionality to gracefully end long running background processes has been a part of standard killall, pkill, etc. for quite some time.
Even then, yes, the functionality of using ps and kill together has existed for 20+ years. Those tools are already implemented, providing the functionality for decades.
In no universe is logind considered robust, and basic scripts from middling UNIX admins have provided this functionality for decades, untouched. Even the "janky" ones.
See my comment below. These tools are fundamentally broken for this use case and have never provided the functionality needed. Bash scripts are not a process manager and it is incredibly wrong to try and make it work like one.
I responded to the comments below. These tools are not fundamentally broken, you're just ignorant in this space. They have always provided the functionality needed. Scripting can easily manage processes at a higher level, and it's basic functionality to make it work like that.
I've already been in a forest of bash scripts and I would not go back there again. I have no comment on systemd's implementation but the implementation you're talking about is also incorrect. It has never been safe to kill random processes using a bash script running in the background, on most Unixes (and Linux) it is 100% impossible to do that without race conditions due to the limitations of procfs. Doing "ps | grep" and "killall" is a footgun. You would need to implement this in C for it to have a chance of being safe at all, and even then, you would need to rely on system-specific functionality because there is no portable way in POSIX to actually do this.
>I've already been in a forest of bash scripts and I would not go back there again. I have no comment on systemd's implementation but the implementation you're talking about is also incorrect.
In certain cases I don't disagree, but systemd does not implement this feature correctly, so using functionality that's easily reviewable from decades past makes sense. If systemd could properly implement the feature, there would be no need for the scripting.
>It has never been safe to kill random processes using a bash script running in the background, on most Unixes (and Linux) it is 100% impossible to do that without race conditions due to the limitations of procfs.
This is hilariously wrong. Lots of UNIX OSes don't even implement the ps suite of tools by using procfs.
Even then, there were no race conditions in this use case anyway.
>You would need to implement this in C for it to have a chance of being safe at all, and even then, you would need to rely on system-specific functionality because there is no portable way in POSIX to actually do this.
It's already implemented this way on plenty of UNIXen. ps and kill is the POSIX portable way to approach this, so you're wrong about that as well.
Almost everything you said above is incorrect, or misunderstanding basic UNIX.
If you really want systemd to add this then I'm sure they will look at your feature request or PR.
I would urge you to actually check with your system instead of blindly dismissing me as wrong just because your bash script happened to work without error. In my experience BSD-based Unixes get it right and don't use procfs for ps or pkill. They don't have the problem because they use special syscalls for this. But SysV-based systems have historically used procfs to implement ps. Linux also still does. Try unmounting proc and running ps or kill and see what happens. If you can't do it then your system suffers from the problem, which is that you can't safely send a signal to the process after reading it because there is no guarantee that the actual PID will persist in between calls to read() and kill(). POSIX says nothing about this because it doesn't specify procfs, or how pkill should actually be implemented. This is all fair game as far as compatibility is concerned.
There is also the other more obvious race condition in your bash script which can also be pre-empted in between the calls to ps and kill. This can happen on any Unix and is not some big mystery either. PID reuse has been a known problem for decades and Linux finally got a solution to it a couple years ago with pidfd_send_signal. There is also the matter of cgroups but I am not going to get into that because I doubt you will want to hear about it.
>If you really want systemd to add this then I'm sure they will look at your feature request or PR.
The less systems touches the better.
>I would urge you to actually check with your system instead of blindly dismissing me as wrong just because your bash script happened to work without error.
Who said this was bash? The script from all those years ago worked perfectly without race conditions.
>They don't have the problem because they use special syscalls for this. But SysV-based systems have historically used procfs to implement ps.
Makes no difference, procfs works fine for this.
>Try unmounting proc and running ps or kill and see what happens.
You're effectively never unmounting procfs. Also, if you managed to, systemd would crash!
>If you can't do it then your system suffers from the problem, which is that you can't safely send a signal to the process after reading it because there is no guarantee that the actual PID will persist in between calls to read() and kill().
There's maybe 10 lines of code to ensure that logic. Again, middling sysadmin work.
>POSIX says nothing about this because it doesn't specify procfs, or how pkill should actually be implemented. This is all fair game as far as compatibility is concerned.
POSIX does say something about this; read about signals. You stop the process before killing it, and ensure that the start time is the same for the stopped process before the kill. That completely eliminates the race condition, using basic POSIX signals.
>There is also the other more obvious race condition in your bash script which can also be pre-empted in between the calls to ps and kill.
That race condition is eliminated with the logic above. That eliminates the PID reuse race condition, even if it's very rare.
>reuse has been a known problem for decades and Linux finally got a solution to it a couple years ago with pidfd_send_signal.
That functionality is where it belongs now, so instead of coding a logic every time you have to ensure PIDs, it's now handled for you.
>There is also the matter of cgroups but I am not going to get into that because I doubt you will want to hear about it.
Correct, I don't want to hear it from someone who doesn't understand POSIX and basic/intermediate sysadmin work.
